


Memory

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Memories, Secrets, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 08:01:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1379989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam finds a machine that allows him to view Dean's memories; he's surprised at what he sees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory

Sam and Dean are on a job down in Mississippi, checking out this guy Daniel Davidson who seems to have the whole town of Petal under his thrall—people just giving him money like’s he’s the March of Dimes and even killing for him if the girl at the diner’s telling the truth. So Sam’s not sure exactly what he expects to find in Davidson’s basement, but it’s sure as hell not a wall of computers hooked together like one of Ash’s wet dreams with the biggest plasma screen Sam’s ever seen hung smack in the middle.

“This is like something out of _Star Trek_ ,” Sam says.

Dean snorts like he wasn’t always Worf when they used to play Away Team and rummages around in the mini-fridge against the south wall. “You go ahead there, Wesley. Work your mojo. I’m just gonna help myself to some of Mr. Davidson’s beer.” Dean kicks back in one of two black leather recliners and twists off the lid of a Coors with the hem of his flannel.

If Dean’s drinking, he’s not clicking his tongue on the roof of his mouth or whistling through his teeth, but Sam has appearances to keep up. “Man, I’m surprised at you. Riding the Silver Bullet on a job.” Sam purses his lips together to piss Dean off and sure enough, Dean shoots him the bird. “Real mature,” Sam says and gets down to the business of working the case.

Sam has absolutely no idea what Davidson’s computer does or even how to turn it on, and he’s not sure activating it’s a good idea anyway. There’s a legal pad wedged under one of the keyboards, though, and after reading a bit Sam thinks he knows what they’re dealing with. Davidson is a fucking genius, an evil fucking genius, but a genius nonetheless. He’s somehow managed to build a Pensieve, straight out of _Harry Potter_ , only its operation is more high-tech than mystical. Unlike the HP version, Davidson’s machine doesn’t extract memories; it records them directly from a person’s brain and then plays them on that plasma screen like a movie. This must be how Davidson’s controlling everyone in town—blackmail. Sam guesses he invites people down to his basement for a movie in hi-def, mind rapes them, and then threatens them with whatever skeletons he finds in their closets. 

Sam’s paging through the legal pad when he realizes that Dean’s been way too quiet for way too long. He glances over his shoulder. Dean’s sprawled boneless in the recliner, Coors upended over his lap and a red light shooting from a projector in the ceiling onto his forehead. Sam panics. “Dean. Dean!” Dean doesn’t stir, doesn’t open his eyes, and Sam’s shirt wicks up beer when he presses against his brother, feeling out a pulse that’s strong and steady. The red light cuts off quick as a blink and Sam forces himself to take a handful of slow deep breaths before he does anything else.

Dean’s fine. He has to be fine. He’s fine. Davidson doesn’t kill his victims. He needs them alive and kicking to be of any use to him. Sam runs a shaking hand through his hair and slides his arms under Dean, ready to fireman him the hell out of here and back to the motel. That’s when the plasma screen kicks on behind him. Sam grabs a push broom that’s leaning in the corner by the stairs; he’s gonna smash this thing to hell and back. Because nobody fucks with Dean like this. Nobody fucks with his brother like this. Sam raises the broom over his head and stops. Because what he sees on the screen is his mother.

Sam has pictures of his mother and even saw her spirit that one night in Lawrence, but that’s all he’s got. All he can remember. The almost insubstantial chill radiating from her, the way his name sounded in her mouth, and then she was gone. The woman on the screen is laughing and her face is two feet tall and Sam can’t look away. He knows this is wrong. He knows it. But it’s Mom and he can’t look away.

“In the great green room,” she says, “there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.”

Dean snuggles down closer, his head cushioned on her breast and one finger caught in the corner of his mouth.

“Good night moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Good night light and the red balloon.” Mom tucks her long hair behind her ear and for the first time Sam notices her belly, big and swollen. She reads slowly, her finger dragging under every word, pausing sometimes to let Dean fill in the blanks. Then the book is finished, and she says, “Kiss Sammy good night?” Dean smashes his chubby toddler face to her belly, lips smacking loudly, and Sam isn’t even aware that he’s crying until the tears pool in the corner of his mouth.

The images on the screen stutter, then freeze, and Sam realizes the machine’s waiting for some input from him, some direction to navigate the lifetime of memories it’s scanned. Sam looks at Dean. He’s breathing easy, an almost smile on his face, and Sam hates himself but he goes through the legal pad again until he can work the controls. Until he can pick a date.

This is selfish and Sam knows it. Selfish and wrong, but Dean will never tell him even if he asks and Sam needs to know. He wants to know that they needed him to stay just as much as he needed to leave. Sam wants to see his father grieve for his absence, wants to see him sorry for the things he said. 

Sam flips a switch, scrolls through the years on the monitor, and hits play. The first image on the screen is teenaged Sam, hair hanging down in his eyes and a duffel slung over his shoulder. He’s got one hand on the door knob already, and Sam doesn’t remember it going down like this. He doesn’t remember the fear on his father’s face, only the fury in his tone of voice. He doesn’t remember Dean biting his bottom lip so hard it bled, only that for once he didn’t step in front of Sam, didn’t step between him and Dad. Teenaged Sam purses his lips, too long arms flailing as he shakes his head and Sam almost laughs when he realizes that Dean’s right. That face makes him want to punch himself. 

Dean drives him to the bus station. They don’t speak. The radio is silent for once, and all Sam can hear is the whirr of wheels on asphalt. The Sam on the screen hunches over in his seat, scrounging in his duffel for the ticket, and Dean reaches out a hand teenaged Sam never sees, almost touches him before pulling back. Sam watches himself walk away, watches himself grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until his T-shirt’s just a thin line of blue in the crowd. Dean pulls out of the parking lot slowly, hands firmly on the ten and the two, and he drives forty five miles an hour until he’s nearly back to the motel. Then he eases the Impala onto the shoulder and vomits into the grass, over and over again until he’s got nothing left but bile.

Sam thought he wanted to know this, to know that he’d gouged an emptiness in his brother to match his own, but the truth is almost unbearable. Sam closes his eyes and is ashamed. 

When he opens them again, the machine’s cycled through to another memory. This time it’s Dean, his back up against the brick wall of a bar, jeans around his ankles, getting what looks to be the best blowjob of his life. The girl is bottle blonde with big tits and red lipstick that leaves a ring around the base of Dean’s cock every time she sucks him down. Dean’s hands are white knuckled on the brick at his back, and the breathy little moans he’s making jolt Sam back to reality, back to what he should’ve done in the first place. His finger’s poised above the off switch when he hears his name. 

“Sammy,” Dean says, and Sam whips around, guilty, but Dean’s still drooling down onto his shoulder. He looks up at the screen and that Dean’s rolling his eyes and clenching his jaw, saying Sam’s name as he comes in the blonde girl’s mouth.

Sam’s shocked, heart beating fast and a kind of sick heat spiraling through to his belly. He doesn’t know what this means. He doesn’t know what it means that Dean gasps out his name at a time like that or what it means that Sam feels it straight down to his dick when he does. Sam can’t think clearly; his hands fall onto the keyboard and the image on the screen changes.

Sam sees himself on his hands and knees, his back arching and Dean sliding wetly into him. Dean bites him on the shoulders, on the neck, sucks big red marks up on his skin before reaching around to grip Sam’s cock. Sam’s talking, too, whispering filth, so dirty and sweet— _Fuck me_ and _Baby_ and _I’ll never leave. I’ll never leave._

But this isn’t a memory because Sam’s pretty sure he’d recall spreading his legs and taking it up the ass from his brother. It’s a fantasy. Dean’s fantasy. Sam really has to get them both out of here, now, because the memories of Mom and Sam leaving—those Dean could forgive. But this? No way in hell. Sam shuts off the machine and smashes it with the broom, grateful for the splinters in his fingers and the numbness in his forearms when he’s done. Then he slings Dean over his shoulder and hightails it back to the motel.

Sam lays Dean out on his bed and gets in the shower, turning the water so hot he can barely stand beneath the spray. He doesn’t know what to do about Davidson. Sure, Sam destroyed his toy, but Davidson could build another and he still has all the blackmail material he gathered using the first machine. People just aren’t meant to have that kind of power, Sam thinks. “Look at me,” he says to the shower curtain. “I had it for all of twenty minutes and I abused the hell out of it.”

He can’t stop thinking about Dean touching him, about the way Dean’s hand looked jacking him off, his ring slipping over the head of Sam’s cock on every stroke. Sam braces himself on the shower wall, pushes against the tile with both hands, and doesn’t acknowledge his hard on. He stands that way for a long time, water burning a trail down his back. 

When he finally leaves the bathroom, Dean’s sitting on the edge of the bed, groaning and holding his head in his hands. “What the hell happened, Sam?” He looks like he’s got one fuck of a headache, but otherwise Dean seems fine and a little of Sam’s anxiety fades.

Sam carefully explains what Davidson’s computer does, tripping over the words some when he has to admit that Dean’s memories were scanned.

“What did you see?” Dean asks, and for once his voice isn’t guarded and Sam can hear how afraid he is.

“Nothing.” Sam says. “I smashed the fucker and brought you back here.”

“Yeah, okay. Okay. Good.” 

That night Sam can’t sleep. His skin feels too tight, almost foreign, around his body. Nothing’s resolved; Davidson’s still free and everything between him and Dean is changed, even if Dean doesn’t know it. Sam watches his brother sleep, face slack, covers drawn up tight under his armpits and wonders what would happen if he pulled those sheets back and slid in beside him. If he spooned up behind Dean and kissed his way down his spine, licked him all over until Dean was saying his name again with that ragged edge of desire in his voice. Somehow Sam knows; down in his gut there’s a truth he can’t shake. One day he’ll find out.

Sam thinks he won’t sleep, but eventually he does. When he sleeps, he dreams. The dream is old, leftover from childhood, one of a handful that Sam has over and over again. It’s not really even long enough to be called a dream—just a cross-section of time, a vivid instant Sam thinks might have actually happened once.

In the dream he and Dean are sprawled on their backs in an empty lot. The sun’s bright, the sky gone this impossible blue and the green of the trees looks wet and intense against it, all glossy and slick like a magazine page. They’ve been running, playing chase maybe, and Sam’s breath is still shallow and hurried. Beside him, Dean’s gulping for air and sweating down into the dirt and the weeds. Sam closes his eyes and when he opens them again, Dean is gone, the grass still tamped down and damp from the pressure of his body. Sam jerks awake, hand curling into the empty space at the edge of the bed.

Dean’s not in his bed. The shower kicks on and Sam dresses quickly, walks down to the front desk for coffee so he doesn’t have to think about Dean naked in the next room, wet and soap slick and water warmed. When he gets back, Dean’s parked in the desk chair lacing his boots.

“Here,” Sam says, handing Dean a coffee. Dean’s fingers slide against his when he takes the cup, a simple brush of skin, familiar and casual and now charged with emotion Sam doesn’t want to name. He swallows thickly, forces himself not to look away.

“Dude, what?” Dean’s staring at him over the styrofoam rim, that _how did you get so retarded_ stare that usually sends Sam from zero to pissed in two seconds flat.

“Nothing. Just tired I guess,” Sam says. “How are you feeling?”

Dean shrugs. “Like I tied one on last night. I think Davidson drugged those beers somehow.”

Sam nods. That makes sense. Davidson can just tell his victims later they’d gotten trashed and spilled their guts, none of them ever knowing the difference. “Dean, I don’t know what to do about that guy. I don’t think there’s anything we _can_ do. He’s just a person. We can’t kill him.”

“I doubt anybody in this town would prosecute us if we did,” Dean says.

“That’s not funny, Dean. You call Bobby, see if he can come up with a solution. I’ll hit some of Dad’s other contacts.”

Bobby says he’ll think it over and call back later; Sam gets voicemail for everyone on his list. Figures.

“What now, Sherlock?” Dean says.

“Nothing to do but wait. I’m gonna dick around on the Internet. Maybe there’s a movie on TNT or something you can watch.” 

Sam opens his laptop and Dean turns on the TV, flips through the channels until he finds reruns of _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ on Spike. He leans back against the headboard, legs crossed at the ankles, and Sam googles throwing knives, clicks through pages of shiny blades until he’s no longer tempted to watch the movement of Dean’s wrists, his hips, his shoulders, as he settles in. Apparently he’s not very successful, because at the first commercial break Dean gives him the stare again.

“What is with you this morning, Sam? You keep looking at me like . . . I don’t know what. It’s freaking me out.”

Sam answers despite himself, mouth running about ten seconds ahead of his brain like always. “When I was at Stanford, I looked for you everywhere. I kept thinking I’d turn around and you’d be in line behind me in the cafeteria, bitching about the rib-shaped patty and charming the lunch ladies into extra helpings. Or you’d be sitting next to me in Anthro trying to look up Dr. Martin’s skirt. You know, I biked halfway across campus one night tailing this Impala, but it wasn’t yours.”

Dean’s sitting on the edge of the bed now, hunched over with his forearms on his knees. He’s listening, but his face is shuttered, and Sam can’t tell what he’s thinking at all.

“I know you think it was selfish of me to leave, and you’re right. It was. But not for the reasons you think. The way we were raised, nobody but each other. Nothing but the mission.” Sam shakes his head. “Man, sometimes I felt like we were the same person. I always knew what you were thinking back then, what you were gonna say before you said it. I’d find myself matching step with you or synching up my breath with yours at night before I fell asleep. Sometimes I wondered who I’d be if you weren’t there. If you were gone. I know this is gonna sound six kinds of stupid, but I didn’t know how to be just Sam. Not Sam and Dean. Just Sam. And I needed to know.” He picks at a hangnail rather than risk a glance at Dean.

“I don’t even know what to say to that, Sam. Where the hell is this coming from?”

Sam doesn’t know how to answer him, and anyway, he doesn’t get the chance; their police radio squawks on, the first traffic they’ve heard since they rolled into town two days ago.

“112 North 25th Avenue? That’s Davidson’s place,” Dean says. “Huh. I guess that answers that question. Are we done with the after school special? Cause I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

Dean’s out the door before Sam fully registers what’s happened. Davidson is dead in his front yard—gunshot wound to the chest—and his split level is busy burning to the ground behind him. Sam shakes off a vague sense of unease; a job working itself out like this always feels like a letdown to him, like too easy of an out, like something they’ll pay for later. When he closes the motel door behind him, Dean’s already got the Impala cranked, “Hell’s Bells” blaring through the open windows.

Over lunch, Dean suggests they head to Hattiesburg for a day or two. They’ve got nothing on their radar just yet, and Dean’s heard the Hub City isn’t short on places to drink and pick up chicks. “Southern girls are great in the sack, Sammy,” he says. “They’re so obliging. My kind of hospitality.”

Sam thinks he’s perfectly fine, that he can close the door on what he saw in Dean’s mind, burn that knowledge down to smoke and ash. Until he meets Donna. 

He and Dean are drinking Red Stripe in this tiny bar called the Thirsty Hippo. Sam was surprised when Dean chose the place; it’s a little townie for his brother’s usual tastes, but the beer is cheap and the crowd is thin. A girl slides onto the stool next to Dean, all legs and tits and this accent like a shot of mellow bourbon. Sam hates her immediately. They talk, the three of them, and Donna isn’t Dean’s typical airheaded mark. Sam has to give her that. But she’s only got eyes for Dean, and Sam knows where this is headed. Sam never likes the women Dean leaves bars with, but he’s never been so willing to examine the reasons why as he is now. Donna puts her hand on Dean’s arm, laughs high and sweet, her fingers plucking at his T-shirt and Sam gives Dean ten minutes before he’s offering to take her for a ride.

Sam looks at Donna’s red mouth, thinks about that lipstick bleeding down her chin and onto Dean and no. Just no. He’s not letting Dean fuck this girl and say his name. Not happening. He’s got to get Dean out of here. He’ll think of some excuse. To Sam’s horror, what he says is, “I lied.” 

Dean turns to him, laughing at Donna’s tongue twisted lewdly around a cherry stem. “What?”

“About not seeing any of your memories. I lied.”

Sam has never seen Dean’s face close down so fast. He’s off the barstool and halfway to the door before Sam can flag the bartender down to pay the tab. Sam leaves Donna bellied up to the bar and pouting, but damned if he’s gonna feel sorry for her. Dean doesn’t say anything until they’re in the Impala, both belted in and Dean’s hands white-knuckled around the wheel. 

“What did you see?” Dean’s voice is low and dangerous.

“I saw you with Mom, before I was born. She was reading to you. And I saw the day I left for Stanford, what happened after I got on the bus.” Sam hesitates.

“Spit it out, Sammy.”

Sam takes a shaking breath and blurts everything before he loses his nerve. “I saw this girl going down on you, and you . . . when you came, you said my name. And then I saw something else, something that wasn’t a memory. More like a fantasy. Of you and me. Together.” Sam can barely breathe with his heart jackrabbiting in his chest like this, and he’s afraid to look at Dean, afraid of what he’ll see.

“Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

Sam looks at Dean then, and Dean’s not walled off anymore. His face is achingly transparent, all his secret places now laid bare and raw, and Sam knows he’s fucked when Dean’s fear and desperation just make Sam want him more. He reaches out to his brother, fists both hands in his shirt, and pulls him close.

“Don’t,” Dean says. “Just don’t. I told myself a long time ago I’d never say no to you, Sammy. So just don’t.”

Sam kisses him anyway, slow and tender, his fingers leaving bruises on Dean’s arms, and he doesn’t stop until Dean’s moaning into his mouth and scrabbling at his zipper. When they get back to the motel, Dean pushes him against the door and sticks his hand down Sam’s pants. Dean jacks him, quick and brutal, and now Sam knows how Dean’s ring feels sliding cool and slick over the head of his cock. He knows what Dean tastes like, what he sounds like when he’s turned on, what his dick feels like in his hand. 

Later, when Dean is sleeping, his arm thrown over Sam’s waist, Sam thinks about what they’ve done, about the lines they’ve crossed. He thinks about the way he felt at Stanford, about the way he was always waiting for that piece of himself he’d left behind. Sam threads his fingers through Dean’s, closes his eyes, and breathes more slowly until his chest is rising and falling in tandem with his brother’s.


End file.
